Paul Willcox, chairman of Nissan Europe, said: “2017 was another record-breaking year for Nissan Europe, and 2018 has started the same way.

The Qashqai’s achievement of reaching 3 million vehicles produced in 10 years is a significant milestone, while the October launch of the new Nissan LEAF has seen record-breaking pre-orders — one every 10min.”

Mr Willcox said Nissan expects to see further records broken in 2018, with total industry sales in Europe and Russia rising by about 2% to 20.2 million vehicles.

Nissan expects the European market to grow by 1% to 18.4 million vehicles and Russia’s market to increase by 7% to 1.8 million.

In October 2016, Nissan announced that the production of an all-new third-generation Qashqai would also be at the Sunderland plant, which began making the next-generation LEAF in December; it also makes the Juke crossover and the Infiniti Q30 and QX30 premium models.